This is an online journal of our education journey. We like to read living books, do lapbooks, projects, and unit studies. We go on educational trips and get together with other families for different clubs.

Tuesday, 21 August 2012

We went away for a short time in July and came back in early August. We had a lovely holiday and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. Now we are back to working on our formal lessons as L is working at taking an exam in January. She is also going to be taking a series of exams for one subject in May or June. This means we have to get back into a formal study routine and schedule, which we have started.

M is going to continue working on her unit studies, which will usually result in a lapbook being completed. Time is a wonderful teacher, and I realised that I was doing it all wrong before and being legalistic. The description said that the lapbook we were doing could be completed in one session and so that's what we did. I don't think either one of us got anything out of it, so now we will spend two to three days working on each lapbook topic. I also have unit studies that I will do with her that are designed to be completed over the course of five, seven or ten days. Obviously this depends on the topic and the complexity of it. Unit studies and lapbooks tend to be cross curricular which means that they cover multiple subjects of a curriculum.

I have found Currclick to be a wealth of e-curriculum resources. They offer many things for free and if it's not free, it's quite reasonably priced, 32p or 50 cents, or 64p or $1.00. There are other more pricey documents/studies/topics on there but I have a few favourite publishers that I purchase from regularly. I just have to make headway through all the curriculum that I have now and get it finished. The advantage of the PDF files of course is that I buy it once, and I can print it twice. L has done some of the high school level science curriculum and when M is of that level I can print the same studies off for her to do, provided she's still at home for her learning. The curriculum also makes a good supplement for school based learning if they need a bit of extra help with something.

A great resource for free lapbooks is Homeschoolshare. They have a lot of free printable lapbook resources for multiple ages at primary school. I have used many of their free things for M to do when she was younger because they have lapbooks for toddlers and preschoolers.

I have made a lot of adjustments to my own routine and it has had a positive impact on those around me. We are all thriving with this particular routine in place. In our case, L does her studies first thing, and then we split any household jobs between the three of us. M likes to do her learning work in the evening just before her Papa gets home. So he sees one of his girls working on lessons when he leaves and the other one working on lessons when he gets home. He must think we do nothing but lessons all day! On the days that there are outside home educator activities, the routine will be different again. I have taken all of that into account and allocated the household jobs to days where we don't have outside activities. I have also cut back on my own personal commitments outside of the home, and I feel much better for it. I am curious to know how others do things who aren't as routine oriented as we are in this household. Please feel free to share about your experiences of routine, whether you have one or whether you don't. It would be nice to know how others do things.